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September 23, 2005

Mark Millar Fails Biology

Mark Millar made a couple of blatant biology goofs in Ultimate FF #23 this week. This would normally be the domain of blogs like Polite Dissent or Suspension of Disbelief, but these are such softballs that I'm going to take a swing at them.

First, Sue Storm causes Zombie Reed Richards to scream out in pain and collapse. Her explanation: "Just collapsed his left synapse. Brain-damaged him. God, that was horrible. I just popped an entire chunk of his brain." The problem is that a synapse is a tiny space between cells; it most certainly is not a "chunk of brain:"

syn-apse (n.) The junction across which a nerve impulse passes from an axon terminal to a neuron, muscle cell, or gland cell.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Later, Sue Storm causes a whole slew of super-zombies to suddenly go blind. How did she pull this one off? Again, in Sue's own words, "Why do people just assume Reed's the smart one? Can he make optic nerves invisible?" Correct me if I'm wrong, but making an optic nerve invisible shouldn't have any effect on sight, should it? Presumably Sue's invisibility power causes light to pass through rather than reflect off of objects. So maybe making the lens or retina of a person's eye invisible would make them blind. But my understanding is that the optic nerve only transmits signals from the eye to the brain, so light bouncing off or passing through the nerve wouldn't have any effect on the person's sight.

The extra dollop of irony here is that Ultimate Sue Storm is supposed to be a teenage biology prodigy. We even see her performing surgery on her own father earlier in the book. It's sad how much research seems to have gone into drawing her as a tawdry porn star and how little research went into making her sound like she knows the first thing about science.

Posted by jdonelson_nyc at September 23, 2005 02:21 PM

Comments

Also, how does she see when her whole body is invisible?

I'd think it would have been more effective to just use little force fields to pop their eyeballs.

Posted by: Jon H at September 23, 2005 10:54 PM

sad how much research seems to have gone into drawing her as a tawdry porn star...

Um, what research? Land traced her right out of whichever issue of Maxim was current when he was "drawing" this issue. :-O

PS: Check your email. I about to send you something.

Posted by: Guy LeCharles Gonzalez at September 26, 2005 04:17 PM

Well, you beat me to it and you're right on the money on your criticisms.

(I wish I had caught this sooner; you would have saved me a post)

Posted by: Scott at September 30, 2005 04:36 PM